Letter to Zoomer men
resist the temptation of nihilism; the future is yours to shape
This is part 4 of a four-part exploration of the inner life of men of different generations.
Part 1 - late Millennials
Part 2 - Gen X
Part 3 - Boomers
Part 4 - Zoomers (this essay)
Feel free to swipe left on this essay, Zoomer Guys. I admit I don’t get you. I am taking a shot here, so be gentle.
You are the children of my Gen X generation, the kids of my friends, the peers of my nieces and nephews. My 6 year-old son looks up to you as role models. You are the hosts of strange YouTube shows he enjoys that I don’t understand. When he started called me bruh and sus, I knew I had to shut that sh*t down and rethink my device controls. It’s no wonder his school is requiring all parents to read Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt this summer.
You guys have lived that book. I sometimes wonder how you survived growing up with social media and easily accessible porn. My first memory of schoolyard porn was when a kid brought a copy of Penthouse Forum to our sixth-grade class, and we passed it around like Soviet samizdat. In high school, there was a paid-access Playboy cable channel, but it was locked down except at the rare home of a divorced dad. For you, dopamine traps are EVERYWHERE. “Like” this. Swipe that. Jump cuts. iPads in the car. Have you ever had space to be bored? To be disconnected? To let your mind rest? No judgment. I’m a digital addict now; I just don’t know what that’s like as a teen or 20-something.
Dating seems awful for you guys, too, unless you’re an A+ Chad in which case your body count is higher than a funeral home. What’s up with the girls in your generation making pouty faces while taking selfies literally everywhere? I don’t blame you for looking at this shallow and ridiculous culture of clout-chasing and opting out.
Based on the stats, your generation is the most LGBT and also the most under-sexed. The most disturbing stat was this one, though: according to Pew, 63% of guys in your generation are single, compared with 34% of women. How does that even work? Assuming this reflects a brokenness in romantic relations, of course you’d rather hang out with gamer friends and gym bros instead of dating.
I also noticed that the political gap between men and women is widest in your generation, with boys more conservative and girls more liberal. I’ve followed some of your political activity from afar, from the groypers on the right to climate change activists on the left. You guys seem smart and… really hard-core. You like to point out the elephants in the room that everyone is ignoring. I respect that because I’m the same way. To you, it may seem like there’s no time to dance around issues. Everything is a catastrophe. Everything is existential. Our backs are against the wall. Stop beating around the bush! Usually, I’m the one like that. But with you guys, I get to be the mellow old guy: Hey. Chill. Put things in perspective. Tone it down.
When I started exploring what’s happening in the souls of Zoomer men, a guy in his 40s quipped, “They were born well into the decline, it’s all they know.” This seemed jaded to me at first, but when I look at trust in public institutions and the trajectory of America during your lifetimes, I take his point.
A 29 year-old friend described his younger Zoomer friends as ironic but not cynical. “Most of them don’t have any experience with functional and innovative institutions, from education, to dating, to healthcare, to finance, to spirituality,” he wrote. “They only know a post-9/11 world and really only know the realities of a post-2008 economy.”
Another 30-something pointed to asymmetries as a theme among Gen Z, where the top 10% of Zoomer men are in doing great but everyone else is broken and suffering. Being in a winner-take-all generation in a winner-take-all society must be frustrating, particularly when your prospects are shaped by things you can’t control.
You may know the saying, the past is a foreign country. To you, 20th century America probably feels like a foreign country. Things have changed so much since then.
You’ve faced some unique obstacles as well. Covid messed up your schooling or early career. A zero-interest rate environment has jacked house prices and rents, creating an affordability crisis.
The question many Zoomer men I know are asking themselves is: Will I ever be able to support a family? Some may look at the odds, throw up their hands, and embrace nihilism. Others are working hard to make a life despite odds that feel long.
Jokes and irony are a way to cope, I get that. And some seasons of nihilism may be part of man’s journey to find meaning. But my strong advice to you guys is to resist letting nihilism swallow you whole. Don’t let darkness colonize your soul. Move beyond the black pill to something with equal parts realism and optimism. Preserve space for joy. Make room for the divine.
Things are rough out there, but opportunities still abound. Some of the asymmetries can work in your favor as much as they can work against you. Our institutions are like cavalry in an age of machine guns; they haven’t adapted to this New World. You guys are living in a zone of dislocation where our social norms and institutions haven’t adjusted to ever-evolving contemporary realities. 20th century-bred minds like mine cannot comprehend what this is like.
But guess who gets to build the new institutions and norms? You do.
You have to play the hand that’s been dealt to you, my dudes. So play it. Your generation faces unique challenges, but boomers are exiting over the next decade and the future is MUCH MORE OPEN than most people imagine. So hold on. Find the spaces to carve out meaning and abundance and a good life. Take advantage of your youth.
You guys are going to lead humanity into the 22nd century. Think about that. It may not feel like it now, but the future is truly yours.
Thank you to and others for insights that I used in this essay.
As a late Gen Z guy, I loved this article. You nailed it.
The point you made about dating is really important and it's something I wish more older guys understood. I see a lot of girls around my age who are also struggling and I've started to realise how difficult finding love is for many of them too. Whilst we are far from allies now, in future I'd love to build some sort of alliance with these girls to create a dating culture which works for normal people.
I saw you comment elsewhere that you thought straight guys were more whiny and I wanted to add my (whiny straight guy) perspective. In dating, gay guys my age appear to have it much easier, dating apps seem to work for them whereas the apps really don't work for many or even most straight guys. Gay guys are praised for expressing their sexuality in ways which straight men are attacked for.
As strange or unbelievable as it sounds, it seems far more socially acceptable in my age group for me to go and hit on a guy rather than a woman.
Thanks for taking the time to write this. I'm trying to find hope instead of nihilism and this article was what I needed to read.
My main takeaway from this profile of Zoomers is just how internally varied they are, something that many other Gen Z profiles fail to take into account. One thing that keeps coming up in intergenerational discussion is how non-Zoomers invariably say "no, the Zoomers I know aren't like that". Anyone older than a Late Millennial is bound to have some kind of sample bias at play that is informing their impressions of Zoomers. Paraphrasing an example: The seven Zoomers in my office are all happy, in relationships, and on the pathway to family formation. How can it possibly be that there are so many NEETs, incels, and otherwise directionless ones then?
I'm an Elder Millennial with many Zoomer friends... that I met them while traveling. What kind of selection bias would be at play? The fellow travelers were likely high openness and agentic. The locals would have again been high in openness and extraverted to have wanted to chat with a foreigner almost 15 years older than them. So the type of Zoomer I'd meet would just be oversampled upwards. At best some of the Zoomers might have been with less extraverted or agentic friends that I wouldn't have met individually, adding some small variety.
While blindspots can cause flawed generational assumptions, this piece actually helps to identify some of the pivot points that cause them.